Tech Heads Mysteriously Appear on Monument to Chinese Spies

In Beijing’s northwest hills a new monument has opened displaying the names of 846 Chinese spies who were executed by the Taiwanese government in the 1950s after their identities were revealed by a mole.

Called the Unknown Heroes’ Commemorative Square, the memorial shines a light on a relatively obscure corner of the history of the conflict between China and Taiwan. But another list of names by one of the monument’s stairwells—that of the donors—highlights quite a different issue.

Though Baidu, China’s largest search engine, has little business in Taiwan, both Tencent and Xiaomi are in the middle of aggressive campaigns to court Taiwanese smartphone users. Tencent has been running advertisements in Taiwan for its WeChat smartphone messaging app, while Xiaomi has just began over the past two months to sell its phones in Taiwan.

When contacted, spokespeople for Baidu and Xiaomi said they weren’t aware that their leaders’ names were on the memorial. After looking into, the companies said the names seem to have been added as a result of a donation by the companies—not the executives—to a separate organization that might have in turn used the money for the memorial, they said.

The plaque listing donors’ names

Paul Mozur for The Wall Street Journal

For Mr. Lei, a donation from Kingsoft Corp., a company he used to run, earned him the recognition. A spokesman for Kingsoft said the company is still trying to figure out which charitable group is responsible.

Tencent and Baidu similarly said that they believed donations from the companies to an organization that later sponsored construction of the memorial led to the names of the executives being placed on the memorial, without elaborating about which organization the each had donated to. Neither Mr. Ma nor Mr. Li directly donated, according to the companies.

The monument’s “donor list” is a reminder of the difficulties China’s Internet companies face as they seek to engage the government. In recent years China’s Internet giants have wielded increasing influence, rooted in part on their popular services that have given average Chinese more freedom than they previously had. But as the companies have grown in prominence, so too has scrutiny from the government.

That has left figures like Messrs. Ma and Lei in the middle of a difficult balancing act. To ensure that their companies can continue to operate, they must maintain a strong relationship with the government; but to ensure the success of their services, they must also compete as efficiently as any international technology company. The result is that Internet executives have become increasingly visible at high-profile government events, like the launch of China’s lunar rover earlier this month.

It remains to be seen how Taiwanese customers will respond to the executives’ names on the monument, but linking Internet companies to Chinese spies who died in their efforts to carry out intelligence missions is nothing short of a public relations nightmare. Not only does it remind users in Taiwan of the companies’ connections to the Chinese government and China’s insistence that Taiwan is a part of China, but it also could raise the prospects of Chinese technology companies turning over information about international users to the government.

Given that the construction of the monument was sponsored by the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army, an investigation to determine from where the donor funds came from is likely to take a while.

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